After spending the better part of the week writing and recording songs as part of the Stanley Hotel Artists in Residence Recording Program, Shannon LaBrie and Joe Robinson took to the stage Thursday night at the hotel’s Concert hall, and didn’t disappoint.

LaBrie opened the show, reminiscing about her time living, working and finding her voice in Estes Park, tossing out one-liners that would make you laugh out loud, then bringing the house down with stirring renditions of her Americana Soul catalog.

When Robinson joined her after her solo set, the chemistry was fantastic. His guitar-playing tastefully dancing around her honeyed voice as if the two had been performing together for decades. But they haven’t.

They have worked together a bit in Nashville, but just recently.

Robinson closed out the show displaying a mastery of virtually every style of popular guitar, even playing two at the same time, but without it feeling like a clinic. His songs dripped with wit and fun, and his easy interactions with the audience made it clear that beyond being an instrumental prodigy, he’s a songwriter that can connect through words and melody.

Earlier in the evening, sitting around a table in the Stanley’s Aspire Hotel, the two shared their thoughts about taking part in this inaugural event.

“This trip has been nice because I feel like creatively we’re, I don’t know, maybe it’s the mountains but I feel like we were kind of in-sync, in a really good way,” LaBrie said.

Robinson, a soft-spoken Australian who happens to be self-taught on the guitar agreed.

“We’ve had a super productive few days. We’ve been writing and we set up a little pop-up studio in the concert hall, and the acoustics in there are spectacular. We’ve just recorded a bunch of music and written a bunch of songs and it’s been amazing collaborating with Shannon,” he said. “I personally didn’t have anything too fleshed out [when I came] I usually have a genesis of a song idea or two, and we’ll go into a writing session and we’ll just talk about what we’re feeling and what we’re inspired by and usually I’ll just come up with a few chords and a groove and Shannon will start singing with her beautiful voice and the song just writes itself, the mountains write the song for us.”

LaBrie, who has a special place in her heart for her once-hometown Estes Park, knows a thing or two about the magic these mountains can add to the creative process.

“It’s like you always go in with a couple of ideas, but you don’t want to cheat the space from giving something you didn’t expect, which definitely happened for us here,” she said.

One of the minds behind the Stanley Artists in Residence program also has roots in the area.

Brent Maher is an engineer, producer, multiple-Grammy winner and living Nashville legend that’s owned a vacation home here for 30 years. A founding member of the Nashville Music Masters, Maher was keen to do something new in this town that he loves, and felt the stars aligned to make this program happen.

“We all think that the event was fantastic. The Hotel was incredibly accommodating. We were just fortunate having our two agendas come together, where they want to start this artist residency program, and us being in Nashville we have access to a lot of up-and-coming artists and established artists that would like to take advantage of what the Stanley’s offering, which is to come up here for whatever time period it is, write music and record music here at the Stanley,” Maher said.

While LaBrie and Robinson were collaborating on new songs, Maher and his business partner Paul Andrews were building a pop-up recording studio inside the Stanley Concert Hall, recording and engineering all of the new material and giving seminars and critiques to songwriters in attendance, while third founding Music Masters member, and northern Colorado music media maven Cynthia Wilson was covering content creation for the event.

Maher, Andrews and Wilson are hoping the collaboration with the Stanley will continue, and grow, helping to make the event a vital part of the arts and music culture in Estes Park. They plan to possibly expand the number of days for the seminars and workshops in the future, bringing more musicians and songwriters to the table, helping locals and those from afar to further their musical ambitions, and with all three of them having strong ties to the area and a deep love of music, it’s easy to think they’ll succeed.